snark: a (well-deserved) attitude of mocking irreverence and sarcasm

September 05, 2019

Donald Trump is a joke of a president. Except, he isn't a funny joke. He's pathetic. Which makes him eminently mockable, because he's clueless about his obvious weaknesses, failings, and insecurities.

If Trump had even a smidgen of self-awareness, if he showed even the slightest bit of compassion for other people, if he even occasionally manifested respect for truth -- then my compassionate Buddha-nature (slim though it is) would look upon Trump somewhat more favorably than I view him now.

But since Trump has never shown me anything but incessant narcissism, incompetence, and non-stop lying, I've concluded that mocking him is the best thing we all can do until he slinks out of the White House, covered in the cloud of crap that surrounds Trump wherever he goes.

I've gone back and forth as to whether I should follow Trump on Twitter. Which reflects the larger debate as to whether ignoring Trump's idiotic antics is preferable to giving him the attention that his insecure psyche demands 24/7.

Currently I'm following Trump, though some mornings (well, many mornings) it's painful to start the day by reading his latest inanities, insults, childish feuds, and nonsensical policy pronouncements. I've come to believe that it's my duty to stay informed about what he's doing on Twitter, in much the same way a puppy that isn't housebroken needs to be kept an eye on.

Since Trump is going to spread bullshit, I figure I should hold my nose and stay aware of it.

This afternoon, as I was driving into town, I heard Anderson Cooper discuss this general issue with a Republican guest on his show. That guy was criticizing the media for paying so much attention to Trump's stupid acts, the most recent being Sharpiegate, Trump clumsily using a black pen to make it look like a hurricane forecast threatened Alabama, which Trump wrongly claimed.

Cooper kept saying that it wasn't the media who made this into a story. It was the president of the United States refusing to admit that when he said last Sunday that Hurricane Dorian could hit Alabama, this was utterly false, since the official forecasts were showing that Dorian was going to move northward along the east coast of Florida.

Geez, the non-genius in the White House couldn't even create a halfway believable forgery. Instead, Trump used a black pen to narrow the white cone of uncertainty that, as is known to anyone with an ounce of meteorological knowledge, always expands with time. So narrowing it added an extra dose of stupidity to what Trump did.

We’re left with two disturbing possibilities. One is that Trump altered the map himself. In that case, we have a president too insecure to admit the slightest misstep and too incapable of logical thinking to do a plausible job of forgery. We also have a president who broke the law, since altering a National Weather Service forecast is a crime.

The other possibility is that someone on Trump’s staff used a Sharpie to fulfill the mission of “proving” Trump right even when he was wrong. That’s basically all the White House communications shop does these days, anyway.

I know it’s a minor episode, but I hope that doctored map makes its way into the Smithsonian someday. Like Washington’s uniform or Jefferson’s desk, Trump’s bogus map embodies the man.

The last I heard, White House officials were saying that Trump himself created the fake map. Which figures. Trump never stops lying, yet the whiny little bitch (as Bill Maher calls Trump) constantly cries fake news!

If he'd take a look in the mirror, Trump would realize that what's being reflected is the most fake president our country has ever endured. From now until Trump is kicked out of office, he deserves constant mockery. I'm pleased to do my patriotic part.

August 27, 2019

I watched some of Trump's hugely insane press conference after the G-7 summit on my iPhone. It was deeply disturbing.

He made just about zero sense, blabbing on and on, for example, about Putin being kicked out of the G-8 because Obama felt something or other -- completely failing to recognize that Putin was ousted because he took over Crimea in defiance of international law.

Then Trump blabbed on and on about how wonderful it was that the United States was extracting more oil, gas, and coal from the ground after being asked about his skepticism regarding climate change, and what he planned to do about it.

He walked off the stage while the reporter could be heard plaintively saying, "You didn't answer my question."

Just when I think Trump can't act worse than he already has, he surpasses his worseness. I just scrolled down the Washington Post page to remind myself of some of his recent WTF?! moments. They include, but aren't limited to...

Well, here's one more thing I strongly suspect Trump doesn't want. Having his ass kicked by a woman in the 2020 presidential election.

That's why I just donated $250 to Elizabeth Warren's campaign. I also like Kamala Harris, but Warren has come to seem like a more viable candidate to me. Her polling is gaining strength. Her policy positions are appealing and plentiful. She projects an air of strength, confidence, and winnability.

There's a long way until the Democratic nomination is settled. I'll be fine with anyone who takes on Trump. I simply felt good sending some money Warren's way, because in this age of Trumpism, it's important to find bright spots in all the darkness Trump exudes.

August 23, 2019

Dear Diary, first, I realize I'm not actually writing in a diary, but I use my blogs as a kind-of-diary, because that way I can remember really important stuff that happens in my life.

Like today, it dawned on me more than ever before that we've got an exceedingly crazy guy occupying the White House. There's not much of a chance that Donald Trump will get saner before he's removed from office.

Still, just in case today marks the high-water mark for Trump's ascent, or descent, into Unheard Of Presidential Incompetence, I want to jot down what happened this week.

Well, mostly today, which makes this shit even weirder, since usually presidents space out their WTF!? moments rather than cramming them all together.

A few days ago, Trump announced he wants to buy Greenland. OK, not him personally. But the United States. And since he thinks he's King, rather than president, I guess he thought he could do this by his Royal Command. The Danish Prime Minister, appropriately enough, called this absurd. Which got Trump all mad, since he doesn't like women to refuse his money. Heck, if a porn star was happy to get a check from Trump, why not a Prime Minister? That's how twisted Trump's mind is.

Trump also wants to do away with birthright citizenship for people born in the United States. Sure, that's in the Constitution, and no president can change the Constitution on their own. King Trump, though, doesn't let trivial details like something being unconstitutional stand in the way of his insane ideas. Neither do psychotic people.

Getting to today, Trump ordered American companies to stop making stuff in China. If a Democratic president had dared to exert government control over free enterprise decisions, they'd be torn to shreds (metaphorically) by defenders of our capitalist system. Corporations weren't happy with this crazy talk, but they must be used to getting a Daily Dose of Insanity in their Twitter feed, if they follow Trump.

Oh, here's a good one, also from today.

Trump asked whether the leader of China or the Chair of our Federal Reserve Board, who Trump appointed, is the bigger enemy. Words fail me, dear diary. Presidents rarely overtly try to influence the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be above politics. And never has a president compared the Chair of the Federal Reserve to a dictatorial leader of a semi-communist country.

Lastly, our Genius President (I'm being ironic, dear diary) just raised tariffs on China big time, thereby escalating the trade war that is generating talk of a coming recession. Why did he do this? Because Trump is worried about a weakening economy. So naturally he does the exact wrong thing, adding fuel to the trade war fire that's weakening our economy.

I know, dear diary, it's hard to believe a president of the United States could be this egotistical, clueless, and stupid. That's why I've written this batshit crazy stuff down, since when this country starts getting back to normal after Trump loses in 2020, people are going to begin to forget what an idiot Trump was.

August 14, 2019

This was a nasty day on Wall Street. Also, on Main Street, for anyone who owns stocks or mutual funds. A 3% drop in a single trading session would grab one's attention under any circumstances, as an iPhone screenshot shows.

However, these aren't normal economic times. Nothing is normal, so long as Donald Trump is president. Which makes it more likely that a recession is on the horizon, given that everything Trump touches turns to shit.

Economic analysts dance around the issue of Trump's massive incompetence by saying things like "trade wars are undermining corporate confidence." A more honest statement would be, "Trump's idiotic love of tariffs, exacerbated by the fact that he doesn't even understand how tariffs work, is screwing up the world economy."

Tariffs on Chinese goods are paid by the importing companies, not by the Chinese.

So tariffs basically are taxes on Americans. This is why Trump just put off imposing more tariffs on Chinese imports until after the Christmas buying season. He and his re-election campaign don't want to be blamed for toys and other stuff that cost considerably more than they would without the Trump tariff tax.

But tariffs are just the tip of the Trump incompetence iceberg.

He's also making a mess of foreign affairs, immigration, fiscal policy, and so much more. Example: somehow Trump and his GOP cronies have managed to orchestrate a massive increase in the federal budget deficit, even though the economy has been quite strong up to now.

Our country is on the verge of trillion dollar annual deficits. Yes, trillion. Yet the deficit hawks in the Republican party have thrown in their Tea Party towel, yawning away as Trump embraces huge debts with no reasonable way to repay them.

Which was Trump's business strategy, of course.

It's no wonder Trump refuses to make his tax returns public. Almost certainly they'd show that his reputation as a savvy businessman rests on nothing but smoke and mirrors, a fantasy that his gullible supporters eat up without questioning how they're being conned.

Corporate CEOs, by and large, have a clearer understanding of Trump's weaknesses. This is one reason a recession is more likely now. There's always been economic ups and downs. But never before has the United States been led by such an incompetent, sleazy, fact-fearing, lying president.

Thus Trump has introduced an extra risk factor into calculations of where the national and world economies are heading: himself.

There's no rhyme or reason to Trump's decisions. He doesn't listen to experts. He doesn't have an overarching political philosophy. He doesn't have a coherent vision. He just does what his Twitter-inflamed mind urges him to do, long-term consequences be damned.

So American corporations are sitting on large amounts of cash, unwilling to spend the money because they have no idea what craziness Trump is going to unleash next. It won't be surprising if many, or most, Wall Street types endorse whoever wins the Democratic presidential nomination, given how bad Trump is for business and investment interests.

They want some assurance that the usual business/investment cycle isn't going to become a topsy-turvy Trumpian thrill ride fueled by his boundless ego and narcissism.

Up to now Trump has gotten by on the momentum of the Obama economic recovery. But good times can't last forever when an Idiot-in-Chief inhabits the White House.

Today may mark the beginning of a Trump recession. That'd be bad for Americans. However, since a recession would markedly decrease Trump's re-election chance, in the long run it would be good for the country, since civilization as we know it wouldn't survive four more years of Trump.

August 11, 2019

We here at the world headquarters of the Salem Political Snark blog -- located, appropriately enough, in Salem, Oregon -- strongly believe in citizens being actively involved in politics.

One great way to do this is by contributing to political campaigns.

So when a fellow patriot shared with me a spreadsheet of Salem donors to President Trump's re-election campaign, information that is publicly available via the Federal Election Commission, I had two strong reactions.

(1) I'm so clueless about spreadsheets, it's damn impressive that someone was able to combine donations to the Trump Make American Great Again Committee and the Donald J. Trump for President Committee into a single file. Miraculous!

(2) I need to thank these Trump supporters in a blog post for their service to our democracy.

I believe I succeeded in correctly copying in the names of the 77 Salem residents who have donated to the above-mentioned committees since January 1 of 2018.

If my senior citizen eyes missed a donor, consult the spreadsheet file I worked with. (Note: the aggregated amounts are in a separate tab.)Download Salem Trump Contributors

Following is an alphabetical list of the reported Salem contributors to the Trump Make American Great Again Committee and the Donald J. Trump for President Committee.

I've honored the top ten contributors by putting their names in red. Again, this is public information, as a recent Vox story makes clear.

That story describes how donors come to be listed in Federal Election Commission reports: "Once contributions add up to more than $200 during a two-year cycle to a certain candidate, then campaigns have to report them to the FEC, including the amount, date of receipt, and the contributor’s name, address, occupation, and employer."

August 09, 2019

Every day Donald Trump does something that irritates me. But there's One Big Thing at the heart of Trumpism that worries me the most, because there's a danger it will live on after, hopefully, Trump departs the White House in January 2021.

Denigrating objective reality to such a degree, people aren't able to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

There are lots of signs of this happening to a scarily great extent. Here's some of them.

-- Trump decrying "fake news!" at every opportunity, even though the mainstream media is hugely more truthful than the lies that constantly spew from Trump's lips.

-- The Trump administration censoring and silencing scientists, especially when it comes to research involving the environment and climate change.

-- Trump's demagoguery where he responds to valid attacks on his character by spewing venomous epithets at those who dare to criticize him. Here's a screenshot from my iPhone today that illustrates this. (Bottom tweet came first, then the one above.)

-- Trump's shameless self-promotion where he tries to make everything about him, thereby doing his best to relegate the most important aspects of reality to the background, while he preens and prances in the foreground. Here's an example from the recent mass killing in El Paso. His smiling thumbs-up speaks wordless volumes about Trump's depravity.

I'd been figuring that, as Wikipedia says, QAnon was just a wacky offshoot of the insane Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed a pizzeria was the headquarters of a child trafficking ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta.

But Rosenberg discusses in a fascinating fashion how deep the tendrils of the QAnon mentality are reaching into certain gullible sectors of the American citizenry. Excerpts:

President Trump and his allies, including former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, are waging a covert campaign to root out an elite child-sex-trafficking ring. Mass arrests are imminent. John F. Kennedy Jr. is about to reveal that he has been alive all along so he can take Vice President Pence’s place on the 2020 Republican presidential ticket. And a mysterious government official using the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” is recruiting soldiers to the cause.

To most of us, these statements are almost too bizarre to be fathomed. But, for believers in the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which the FBI recently identified as a domestic terrorist threat, they are important truths. I understand the temptation to dismiss anyone who believes in this wild concoction as merely easily misled.

Such disdain makes it easier to believe that QAnon and beliefs like it remain at the fringes of American life. But to focus merely on QAnon’s content and not the form it takes is to miss why the conspiracy theory has spread so widely — and why similar ideas may prove incredibly difficult to combat.

The best way to think of QAnon may be not as a conspiracy theory, but as an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game with extremely low barriers to entry. The “Q” poster’s cryptic missives give believers a task to complete on a semiregular basis. Even more so than conventional video games such as “Fortnite Battle Royale,” which rolls out new seasons with new scenarios roughly every 10 weeks, QAnon is open-ended — or it will be as long as the revelations continue.

...Once a person has started consuming QAnon content, the actual gameplay is relatively simple. Participants concoct their own interpretations of Q’s gnostic “bread crumbs,” or share those dreamed up by others.

If this were a conventional game, the play might end there. But QAnon players have shown an increasing tendency to enlist the rest of us as unwilling participants in their fantasies, sometimes with violent consequences.

...While most QAnon believers will never engage in violence, part of the appeal of QAnon for participants is that the conspiracy theory assigns enormous significance to even relatively minor acts such as posting on message boards or sharing Facebook posts.

...“It is addictive in the same way that a game is,” says Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon. By contrast, “conventional political participation” is oriented toward far more mundane processes, and “That all has the impact of what, hopefully getting a state assembly member elected that you feel at best ambivalent about?”

View suggests that “Q offers something a hell of a lot more. You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations.”

...It’s one thing to try to debunk QAnon and white-supremacist ideas, whether by trying to prove that John F. Kennedy Jr. is definitively dead or to combat demographic narratives of “replacement.” It’s quite another to figure out how to offer adherents of QAnon and other distorted worldviews experiences that will be as thrilling and fulfilling as conspiracy games have become.

As View put it, we’re living not in a marketplace of ideas but in a “marketplace of realities.” And the tools of gaming have given disaffected people the ability to bend our reality to theirs, whether we like it or not.

A marketplace of realities. Great way to put it.

Like many progressives, I look back with a strange fondness upon the presidential days of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

I disagreed with most of their policies, but at least our disagreements occurred in the same reality. Sure, they fudged the truth from time to time. Every president does.

However, in comparison to our current Reality Denier In Chief, these old style Republicans now seem appealingly reasonable. By and large, these conservatives embraced the same facts as their liberal opponents. So policy discussions occurred in the same reality, which is essential for productive debates.,

Trump, on the other hand, views everything through a political lens. He doesn't want intelligence officials to tell him what is actually going on in the world. He wants them to tell him what he desires to hear, a very dangerous presidential proclivity.

May 08, 2019

A little while ago I watched the House Judiciary Committee vote to hold the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, in contempt of Congress. This is only the second time in our nation's history that an A.G. has gotten a contempt citation.

It's a big deal. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the chair of the committee, just told reporters that we're now in a constitutional crisis.

The Trump administration is refusing to honor every subpoena Congress issues. The Trump administration refuses to allow Robert Mueller to testify about the report he issued into Russian interference with the 2016 election, how Trump officials interacted with that Russian effort, and Trump's efforts to obstruct the Mueller investigation. The Trump administration has declared that the entire Mueller Report is subject to executive privilege, which is legal bullshit.

So this has gone way beyond the usual fights between the Executive and Legislative branches of government. Trump and his cronies are refusing to recognize Congress as a co-equal branch within our republic.

Plenty of people, including Nadler, if I recall his news conference correctly, are saying that we're well on the way to becoming a banana republic ruled by a strong man who refuses to abide by long-established norms of presidential behavior.

Problem is, our system of government is largely based on those norms.

Sure, laws and the Constitution are important. But equally important has been unwritten norms such as: the president speaks truthfully most of the time; Congressional oversight isn't stonewalled; a free press is encouraged, not disparaged; subpoenas from Congress are taken seriously, not rejected entirely.

Impeachment is the strongest weapon Congress has to constrain abuses of presidential power.

Yet it is clear that Senate Republicans would never vote in favor of an impeachment resolution sent over by the House. Further, impeachment isn't favored by most Americans, though beginning impeachment-related investigtions is more popular.

Why attempt to impeach, though, when impeachment would never happen? I realize the emotional appeal of impeachment. What Trump is doing is beyond bad. It is despicable. All presidents behave badly at times. Trump is the first president who truly is acting like a wanna-be dictator.

The courts are another check on presidential power.

However, lawsuits by Congress and others likely would take many months, if not years, to be settled. And even if a favorable court decision happened earlier, who is going to make the Trump administration act in accord with it?

Attorney General Barr has sacrificed himself onto the altar of Full-Out Trumpian Acquiescence, like so many other Republicans.

When the head of the Justice Department isn't interested in pursuing even-handed justice, but acts like the president's personal attorney, and the Supreme Court seems to be firmly in Trump's camp, it's hard to be optimistic about the American legal system being a serious check on Trump's dictatorial ambitions.

This is why my reasonable side says focus on the 2020 election, while my emotional side says impeach the S.O.B.

Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, had some provocative tweets today that resonated with me. They were in response to someone who argued that Nancy Pelosi isn't being a bold enough leader.

The big issue, I think, is that the House Democrats have to decide what they’re going to do about their relative lack of power, compared to the executive branch, and they may have to do that sooner rather than later. Pelosi can try to continue to stake out a middle ground, but they are running up against some big structural limitations — and I agree that impeachment lite is not a workable strategy in the long term.

It seems like the central challenge for Democrats is: Can you run on normalcy and basically treat Trump as an aberration? Or do you have to deal with the structural problems his presidency is exposing? The latter, of course, is incredibly hard to do.

By "impeachment lite," I believe this person meant that Democrats do as much investigating into wrongdoing by Trump as possible, but hold off on actually trying to impeach him. The obvious problem with this is that the more wrongdoing that's discovered, the harder it becomes to ignore it -- and accompanying calls from the Democratic base to impeach Trump.

Here's the way I see things.

I ask myself a couple of questions: (1) What if the Dems attempt to impeach Trump and he wins re-election in 2020? Would I be happy? Answer is NO. I don't want Trump impeached. I want him out of office ASAP. (2) What if the Dems don't try to impeach Trump and he loses re-election in 2020? Would I be happy? YES. Deliriously.

This shows that, along with most Democrats and a large share of independents, what I most care about is Trump being kicked out off office in the 2020 election. Impeachment is secondary. If it helps accomplish a Trump defeat, great. If it doesn't, not great.

Another way of putting it is, what's the core problem facing our country?

I'm optimistic enough to say that it really is Donald Trump, not a desire among Republicans and Trump voters to refashion our constitutional democracy into a banana republic ruled by a succession of strong men (and maybe women).

So in line with the FiveThirtyEight quote above, I'm inclined to view Trump as an aberration. A dangerous aberration, yes. An aberration who has to be fought mightily, yes. But an aberration that can be out of office in January 2021 if Democrats play their cards right between now and the 2020 election.

Impeachment proceedings would suck all of the air out of the news cycle.

Even if Democrats want to talk about Trump's latest attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, further enrich the already wealthy, engage in unneeded trade wars, screw up our relationships with long-time allies, promote hateful immigration policies, ignore the dangers of climate change, and such, impeachment will be front and center in voters' minds until the Senate votes to absolve Trump.

Which will lead Trump to scream another witch hunt at the top of his lungs just before the 2020 election, most likely.

Instead, I favor the Democrats saying, "We're not going to impeach Donald Trump in Congress. Instead, the voters are going to have the opportunity to remove him from office in November 2020. Yes, we believe he has engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors. We just want you, the American public, to make the decision to deny him a second term."

May 01, 2019

If you like the prospect of the United States becoming a banana republic dictatorship where the rule of law doesn't apply to the Supreme Leader, you'll applaud Attorney General William Barr's trumpian display of arrogance, bad faith, and misleading testimony today at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

But being part of the majority of Americans who want our democracy to remain intact, I found one statement by Barr rose to the top of the OMG! I can't believe the head of the Justice Department just said that! pile, which was teetering precariously by the end of the hearing, the crap Barr said being so voluminous.

Then, in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein about why it was that Trump ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to end the Mueller probe, Barr seems to have again taken the legal position that the president’s anger and frustration over press reports that he had instructed McGahn to fire Mueller somehow made this directive permissible.

Barr seemed to be saying that Trump could not have committed obstruction by asking McGahn to fire Mueller, so long as he was attempting to forestall further negative press. As Barr put it:

If the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false, and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel.

This is an astonishing claim—that if the president feels that the investigation is unnecessary and is resulting in him being harassed or misrepresented in the media, then the president is justified in taking any action he sees fit to stop it without running afoul of the obstruction laws.

It’s also a claim that was refuted in the Mueller report itself. It’s Nixonian in scope to imply that anything Trump wants to do in order to push back against the media and protect his reputation is legal and justified.

So Barr's right-wing-wacko legal theory is that if President Trump feels he's been falsely accused of something, he can fire those who are investigating the possible wrongdoing without fear of being guilty of obstruction of justice.

This is the dream of every criminal -- to be able to get rid of the police, prosecutors, judge, jury, and anyone else who threatens to bring them to justice.

Your honor, it is my distinct pleasure to inform you that your services are no longer needed in this case, along with the jury, district attorney, and all of the witnesses. In accord with the view of the Attorney General of the United States, I feel that I've been falsely accused and I don't like how newspapers have been covering my trial. So I'm ending this farce.

Before I heard Barr say what he did today, I would have thought it impossible that the Attorney General would hold that if a president thinks he is being falsely accused, he can fire those investigating the accusation with no fear of punishment.

But Barr said exactly that. Which is why I consider this to be the most shocking thing William Barr said today. Unfortunately, tomorrow is another day.

April 18, 2019

For a political junkie like me, today's non-stop coverage of William Barr's embarrassingly awful press conference and subsequent analysis of the redacted Mueller report has felt like taking a really long hot shower that leaves you both blissfully exhausted and pleasantly energized.

I've read the tweets. I've looked over Washington Post and New York Times stories. I've listened to much of what MSNBC had to offer, while fast forwarding through repetitive or uninteresting parts. I've scanned some of the report.

Here's what leaps out at me after the initial coverage of the lengthy Mueller report.

Barr should be impeached. Likely he won't be, but some smart political analysts have suggested this as a seemingly foolproof way for Democrats to get the unredacted Mueller report. It's clear that Attorney General Barr lied in his initial four-page letter about the Mueller report. He mischaracterized the report's findings and is now acting like Trump's personal attorney, rather than as the leader of a Justice Department that serves the American people, not the president.

Mainstream media has been vindicated. Despite Trump's inane claims of "fake news," virtually everything that's been reported about the Mueller investigation over the past few years turns out to have been true. This includes commentators who argued that collusion occurred between Russia and the Trump campaign, and that Trump engaged in obstruction of justice. Both things happened.

Collusion, yes; conspiracy, no. Above is a screenshot from page 2 of the Mueller report. Trump and Barr have been (figuratively) screaming No collusion! However, Mueller made clear that collusion, or even coordination, don't have settled definitions in federal criminal law.

In the excerpt above, he strongly implies that the Trump campaign did engage in actions that "were informed by or reponsive to" actions and interests of Russians, along with WikiLeaks. There wasn't an agreement between the Russian government and the Trump campaign regarding election interference. But there was a heck of a lot of collusion between Russians and people associated with the campaign.

Russian interference in the election is undeniable. Page 1 of the report makes this clear, as shown above. The Russians favored trump and disparaged Clinton. Russia stole documents from the Clinton campaign, which then were released by WikiLeaks.

And there were numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Paul Manafort provided polling data to Russians relating to key midwest battleground states that Trump won with the aid of Russian disinformation efforts through social media.

Trump engaged in obstruction of justice. Mueller provides ten pieces of evidence relating to obstruction of justice. Yet he didn't issue an opinion on this part of the investigation. Instead, it's clear from the report that Mueller left it up to Congress to decide what to do on this front, since a sitting president can't be indicted on this charge (or maybe any charge).

So Barr lied when he claimed in his four-page report that Mueller's failure to say that Trump engaged in obstruction of justice had nothing to do with the fact that a president can't be indicted. Actually, that fact was the main reason Mueller left it up to Congress to decide how to handle the obstruction charges.

Trump encouraged people to lie. He repeatedly tried to get Mueller fired. He did fire Comey, the Attorney General at the time. There's compelling evidence that Trump obstructed justice. Fortunately, he didn't succeed, but not for lack of trying. The only question is how House Democrats should hold him accountable for this.

Impeachment seems more likely, though not inevitable. Until today I'd been thinking that impeachment was off the table for Democrats. However, the Mueller report contains so much damning information about Trump (much of it already known, but not clearly packaged), it's hard to see how Trump should be allowed to get off without further investigations of some sort.

If Congress doesn't serve as a check on how Trump has been abusing presidential power, future presidents will be tempted to further expand the boundaries of criminality and unethical behavior. Sure, politically impeachment may be a bad idea that would help Trump's re-election chances. But holding oversight hearings could be the next best thing.

Investigations are ongoing. Even a cursory review of the report shows numerous mentions of "Harm to Ongoing Matter," or HOM -- such as this section regarding the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

So while Trump may hope that the Mueller investigation is behind him, spinoff investigations continue. Plus, there are several other investigations by both federal and state authorities into possible wrongdoing by Trump and his companies. We're at the end of a beginning, but likely not at the beginning of the end.

Sleaze and bad behavior. All of the evidence in the Mueller report about sleazy, unethical, and generally bad behavior by Trump and his cronies would cause massive headlines in every newspaper if so much of this hadn't already been reported on. There's no doubt that the Trump presidency is deeply flawed, to put it mildly.

Ordinarily, the White House press secretary lying about staff in the Justice Department being pleased with Comey's firing would lead to a firing. Or at least an abject apology. But Sanders lies so often about everything, as do many others in the Trump administration, we've gotten used to this crap -- in line with the frog slowly boiling in water analogy.

Like a Mafia crime family, Trump has been able to get away with (non-literal) murder because his fingerprints aren't directly on the crime scene. And the Mueller report says that people associated with Trump were able to delete electronic evidence, or hide it on encrypted devices, which made it difficult to investigate certain areas.

Hopefully the Democratic leadership in Congress will be able to find a way to do the right thing for our country, while also doing the right thing for the Democrat 2020 nominee to beat Trump. Impeachment may not be the best option, but doing nothing about the deeply disturbing Mueller report findings also isn't an option.

But Donald Trump is in a league of his own. And that's not a compliment. He's the only president who has refused to abide by norms of generally decent behavior that have allowed our country to remain a vibrant democracy through good times and bad.

After this week's events, my brain has jumped from possibility mode to holy shit we're in deep trouble mode.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope our national institutions -- Congress, courts, public opinion, elections -- are up to the job of keeping Trump from becoming the dictator president he clearly wants to be.

At the moment things don't look very encouraging, though. Let's count some of the reasons I feel this way.

(1) Most Republicans are willing to let Trump do whatever the hell he wants. His Gallup approval rating has jumped six points to 45% recently. Trump's approval among Republicans is 89%, among Democrats 8%, among Independents 39%. But Trump only considers himself president of his base, not the whole country. So he feels entitled and emboldened.

(2) William Barr, his Attorney General, seems determined to be Trump's personal lawyer rather than an impartial dispenser of justice. He unilaterally determined that Trump didn't obstruct justice after Mueller said evidence of this was equivocal. This week Barr claimed that the Trump campaign was "spied" on even though there's no evidence of this. A hit job on people considers to be his enemies seems to be Barr's goal. And Barr is doing his best to keep the Mueller report as hidden as possible.

(3) Trump wanted Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, to close the border with Mexico, even though Nielsen told him this would be illegal. Nielsen then resigned. Now Trump is putting his cronies in charge of immigration policies. Rather than being embarrassed by reporting that a plan to move migrant detainees to sanctuary cities had been considered, but rejected, Trump now is saying he is seriously considering doing this -- an atrocious and likely also illegal move.

(4) The Mueller investigation was treasonous, according to Trump. He's used that term 26 times. Greg Sargent writes, "Because Trump knows the seriousness of the charge, he therefore must be interpreting treason the way King Henry VIII did, in the lèse-majesté sense: Treason is anything that offends the dignity of the sovereign. Disagreement with Trump is an offense against the state, just as Henry executed unfaithful wives for treason."

(5) Trump reportedly offered to pardon the acting Homeland Security director if he violated the law and was arrested for blocking entry into the U.S. along the border with Mexico. That's obstruction of justice, but since his Attorney General believes it is impossible for a president to obstruct justice, Trump feels free to indulge his dictatorial tendencies.

Maybe this is a low point for American democracy and an upswing is coming. If so, it can't come soon enough for me. We can't wait for the 2020 election to make things right.

And I've got to say that while until now I've scoffed at Bill Maher's contention that if Trump loses the election he won't leave office willingly, that possibility is starting to seem a lot more likely to me.